Time travel at the Festival of the Arts

Photo by Evelyn Taylor
This is the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts Time Machine while it was under construction. The festival offers audiences the opportunity to travel through time and visit the fourth dimension with an innovative time machine exhibit centrally located in the Kimmel Centerís Plaza that serves as the festivalís hub.

A lot of entertainment events feature a look to the past whether it is an oldies music act, a theater production of a Shakespeare play, an orchestra performing a centuries-old classical piece or a concert by a classic rock band from the 1960s. And, there are other events that are based on the future.

The Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts (PIFA), which is presented by the Kimmel Center, does all that and more.

“If You Had a Time Machine,” the 2013 edition of PIFA, is scheduled to open on March 28 and run through April 27. With more than 50 festival performances and events taking place throughout Philadelphia, 50 regional arts and cultural partners and 32 new works, PIFA is an ambitious undertaking.

PIFA 2013 offers audiences the opportunity to travel through time and visit the fourth dimension with an innovative time machine exhibit centrally located in the Kimmel Center’s Plaza that serves as the festival’s hub.

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Designed by a team of artists, the Time Machine is a dynamic sculptural light, sound, and video installation made for interactivity. It serves as a calendar that tracks time by the century and captures information about all the people who have ever lived — showing how we are all linked together in the wormholes of time.

With its large shape (100 feet in length and 16 feet in diameter) influenced by DNA, tornadoes, the Hadron Collider, sound waves and an EKG, it features a giant spiral that swirls across the plaza. It starts at the Kimmel’s Broad Street entrance doors and has five large arched curves that function as “bays” of interactive activity exploring the relationship between time and space.

Visitors will be able to interact by actually connecting the dots of humanity onto a clear touch screen surface, and then seeing their connections projected in an ever growing spiral drawing on a visual screen. The journey concludes with a video comparing the history of the Earth to a 24-hour period with humanity only appearing on the planet for the last 30 seconds.

The interactivity goes beyond personal trips through the machine. Every night except Mondays, the time machine comes to life with free performances at 7 and 10:30 p.m. for the production of “Flash of Time,” a new musical show written for PIFA by Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk.

Other activities at the Kimmel’s Plaza throughout the run of the festival include FREEFriday noon concerts, family fun activities, Saturday Night Theme Night parties, Decades Mixers, Philly Nights, Late Night Jazz and a variety of a capella performances.

Other featured shows are Panamanian jazz pianist Danilo Pérezmwith and his Panama 500 Band (April 26), instrumentalist and composer DJ Dan Deacon (April 12), Choir of King’s College, Cambridge with a program incorporating The Fred J. Cooper Memorial Organ (April 6) and contemporary dance company Philadanco performing a world premiere of new choreographed work by Christopher Huggins (April 19-21).

The list of music shows also includes performances by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, Latin Fiesta, Rufus Wainwright, Jazz Bridge, Peter Nero and the Philly Pops, Bearded Ladies Cabaret, Taller Puertorriqueño and Orchestra 2001.

More information and complete schedules of all the music, theater dance and family presentations can be found at PIFA 2013’s website www.pifa.org.